“This collection is as much a call to action on what scholarship is or can be as it is a specific treatment of hands . . . itself an experiment in how many approaches to a topic can meet in a single collection . . . Victorian Hands adds yet another join to the hand as tool; it provides a new model for how to manufacture work across a broad scholarly community.” —Tobias Wilson-Bates, Victorian Studies
“Victorian Hands promises to become an oft-referenced work in Victorian, body, and disability studies. Its through-line is a deep concern with the individual. What it means to be human, especially rejiggered in the face of human exceptionalism’s expiration date, will keep this collection’s readers thinking.” —Barbara Black, author of Hotel London (OSU Press, 2019)
“Victorian Hands tells a remarkable story about the meaning and matter of the human hand. It touches on manual labor, tactile sensation, the materiality of writing, and the embodiment of agency, among many other innovative topics. For anyone interested in figural representation, this book illuminates the hand’s extraordinary capacities as both agent and object.” —William A. Cohen
Until recently, the embodied hand has paradoxically escaped the notice of nineteenth-century cultural and literary historians precisely because of its centrality. The essays in Peter J. Capuano and Sue Zemka’s new collection, Victorian Hands: The Manual Turn in Nineteenth-Century Body Studies, join an emerging body of work that seeks to remedy this. Casting new light on an array of well-known authors—Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, William Morris, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde—the volume explores the role of the hand as a nexus between culture and physical embodiment. The contributors to this volume address a wide range of manual topics and concerns, including those related to religion, medicine, science, industry, paranormal states, language, digital humanities, law, photography, disability, and art history. Examining hands, language, materiality, and agency, these contributors employ their expertise as Victorianists in order to understand what hands have to tell us about the cultural preoccupations of the nineteenth century and how the unique conditions of Britain at the time shaped the modern emergence of our cultural relationship with our hands.
Contributors
James Eli Adams, Karen Bourrier, Aviva Briefel, Peter J. Capuano, Jonathan Cheng, Kate Flint, Pamela K. Gilbert, Tamara Ketabgian, J. Hillis Miller, Deborah Denenholz Morse, Daniel A. Novak, Julianne Smith, Herbert F. Tucker, and Sue Zemka
Peter J. Capuano is Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author of Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body.
Sue Zemka is Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is the author of Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction Handling Flesh and Metaphor
Peter J. Capuano and Sue Zemka
Part I Hands: Whole and Part
Chapter 1 The Anatomy of Anglican Industry: Mechanical Philosophy and Early Factory Fiction
Peter J. Capuano
Chapter 2 Lost Hands and Prosthetic Narratives: William Dodd, Writing at the Industrial Join
Tamara Ketabgian
Chapter 3 “A Fiery Hand Gripped My Vitals”: Admiral Nelson, Amputation, and Heroic Masculinity in Jane Eyre
Karen Bourrier
Part II Hands, Plot, and Character
Chapter 4 Hands and the Will in The Woman in White
Pamela K. Gilbert
Chapter 5
Hands at a Séance: Manual Evidence in Victorian Spiritualism and the Ghost Story
Aviva Briefel
Chapter 6 Hands and Minds in The Moonstone
Sue Zemka
Chapter 7 The Dead Hand: George Eliot and the Burdens of Inheritance
James Eli Adams
Chapter 8 Computation and the Gendering of Gestures
Jonathan Cheng
Part III Framing and Staging Hands
Chapter 9 The Photographer’s Hand
Kate Flint
Chapter 10 Staged Hands in Bleak House
Julianne Smith
Part IV Manual Exceptionalism in Later Victorian Literature and Culture
Chapter 11 Handling Private Dramas of Class and Gender in Anthony Trollope’s The Duke’s Children
Deborah Denenholz Morse
Chapter 12 Reading by Hand: Oscar Wilde and the Body in the Archive
Daniel A. Novak
Chapter 13 Hands in Hardy and James
J. Hillis Miller
Afterword The Well Spoken Hand
Herbert F. Tucker
List of Contributors
Index
